It is difficult. to say which is the more impressive career accomplishment:
to have generated an endlessly renewed trail of agitative hypotheses over
a 30-year period, or to have eschewed nearly all the comforts of' consolidation
and the inevitable complacencies afforded by conventional, repeatable "successes"
such as the production of "great" buildings or the development of a signature
style. In both these respects, Peter Eisenman differs not only from other
architects of his own generation, but firm nearly all other architects working
today.
When Eisenman's work began in the early sixties it. was, and remains
to this day, a primarily tactical enterprise: its force from the outset was
drafted from that of the enemy classicism but was also turned aggressively
against it... Eisenman's task has been to develop a practice that, to borrow
an expression from Foucault and Nietzsche, would come from outside. There
is not now, nor has there ever been a fixable Eisenmanian alternative
architecture; tactical space after all is made up of a series of seized
"occasions," so that the momentary triumphs that punctuate its unfolding
campaign are never indeed cannot be stored. Eisenman's practice is assembled
and articulated in movement and in the spirit of movement; it operates through
invasion, disruption, and the release of temporarily trapped forces into
free motion and recombination.
From the Introduction
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